If maps could speak

Vernon and Becky Luers live east of Greenfield. Across the road from their farm is a marker that denotes the bygone community of Nanito. If the marker wasn’t there, you probably wouldn’t realize there was once a town there.

Nanito is one of the 35 plus communities that once made up an Adair County map. Not anymore, as only eight incorporated towns are now here.

Dave Baker once had a roommate at Central College tell him that there wasn’t anything to see or do in Iowa. Baker, a history buff who was already working at a Pella museum, took that statement to heart. He set out to prove this roommate wrong.

Baker, armed with his laptop and camera, has now photographed a large number of Iowa’s 947 towns and over 1,500 ghost towns. He tells the stories of these localities in a project he calls The 29th State. Baker uses social media platforms and a website to tell these stories and share his images.

Baker gave a presentation Saturday at The Orient Public Resource and Technology Center and shared with a room full of over 65 people stories and facts pertaining to many of these ghost towns that were once in Adair County. Baker explained what made some of them up, where they were and why they may have died or thrived.

Luers was one of a few people in attendance who has firsthand knowledge of one of these ghost towns.

“I had seen him put something up about Nanito [on his Facebook] so I emailed him. I’m thinking that’s where he got that my great grandmother was one of the first women students at the University of Iowa, Anna Ward Buck,” she said. “[My great grandfather] was from Germany and came over when he was about 19. He died when he was very young. My grandfather was 16 and took over the farm with help from his mother, Anna. I think that’s why they both were put in charge of a post office, because they were both educated.”

The story of Nanito is not uncommon. Generally, whether it be the railroad or a water source such as the Middle River, towns had a reason for rising and subsequently, a reason for either failing or enduring. For Nanito, it was a post office. For Orient, it was a post office, then the railroad.

One factoid Baker told was that all of this county’s eight surviving incorporated communities had railroad access through a significant portion of their history. Zion was the only unincorporated town that had railroad access and it was one of the longest surviving ghost towns, boasting a church, school, and more. It remains a tight-knit rural neighborhood east of Orient to this day.

“A lot of these towns came about because there was a post office, maybe a trading post or a general store there. Others came about because someone wanted to make an extra dime off of it, which was very common,” Baker said. “I went through a bunch of old maps, atlases and postal directories, and I came up with a list of every site that could potentially be a community that has ever existed in Adair County.”

On this list Baker compiled are places we know today such as Canby, Avondale, Richland, Zion, Stanzel or Hebron, but there are lesser known names on the list, too, such as Linwood, Leith City, Wahtahwah, Groveland, Rosserdale and Fisk.

Baker has photographed personally over 85 of Iowa’s 99 counties. He has compiled information on nearly every place he has visited and wants to uncap for people of all ages the depths of the history that can be found in small towns that have survived and the ones that haven’t.

Baker’s family mostly hails from Mahaska or Jasper Counties in central Iowa, but he recently found out, through his work, that he has relatives in Guthrie County.

“We really share the mortality with our communities. Our communities are born, live and pass away, and my goal is to try to perpetuate this as much as possible. While I might not be able to go out and save buildings, because I’m a terrible carpenter, I do enjoy going out and taking pictures and telling the history of these communities. That is what I do and that’s my effort to preserve these places and make them accessible for future generations,” Baker said. “Even though these ghost towns have disappeared from the map and some of them were barely towns to begin with, I’m hoping people will get excited about that and their local history.”